It’s a little house we all live in. But we’ll be fine if we can just learn to dance well with everyone else. So, first ask yourself the questions: How does everything implicate me? In what way do I contribute to it all? I’ll ask myself those questions too.
Photo: Marty Buhler (2017) detail of Dan Higgins Dance
Check Your Cherished Opinions Stand Up and Be Counted Compromise for the Benefit of the Collective On the eve of the 2016 election, I am at rest. No more campaigning. No more snappy rejoinders on Facebook. No more snark. And while I believe there is a time to play the …
This review originally appeared in 15 Bytes Magazine. “House Under the Moon” was a finalist for the 2013 15 Bytes Book Awards in poetry. I liked this book partly because I’ve met Michael personally in Logan where he and his family live, and partly because he’s a practitioner of Buddhist …
In the fall of 2013 the winners of the first annual 15 Bytes Book Awards were announced. As the literary editor of this online arts magazine, I had the privilege of working with other magazine staff and the editor, Shawn Rossiter, to determine all the particulars of launching a new …
“It’s rare to read poetry that is this experiential, visceral and somehow transcendent at the same time. In three sections Bertram runs her electric fingers as if over the braille of American life as varied as wildlife (coyotes, elk), the natural sciences (inter-galactic formulas, weather patterns—in both a …
In Nov. 2013 at the Orem [Utah] Public Library, author Brian Doyle gave a reading as part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival. Below is a short essay he handed out to everyone in the audience and asked that we post on this day commemorating the massacre at Sandy Hook …
“MOTHERLUNGE IS A FULL-FRONTAL assault on every dappled, dimpled and doily-enhanced image we’ve had of both women and mothers. Think Sandy or Orem, Utah—scrubbed clean with culturally-defined markers of motherhood, riven with Victorian charms that are neither really Victorian or charming. Then think the opposite.That is Scott’s literary world. That the story is also hysterically funny …
As with this country of ours at large, there is at play, in Jana Richman’s new novel The Ordinary Truth (Torrey House Press, 2012), the national see-saw of delusions vs. reality, collective doctrines vs. the sweet, inevitable flux of life’s authentic rhythms. In central Nevada—the driest state in the union, …
After the Newtown Massacre eight days ago, I am reminded of why I started this blog. We are all implicated in this tragedy because we all live in the same, little house together. Here is what I posit: Everything implicates all of us. All Americans are implicated by the attacks …
I meant to write a review of the sprawling novel of America’s Oregon Coast, Mink River by Brian Doyle over Thanksgiving, because it was what I was grateful for. As the year ends, I realize I’m thinking about it still. Grateful for it, still. Doyle’s narrative style is off-putting (at …
Part 25 July 2010, The Uinta Mountains, Utah At Wanship, Utah the freeway curves so sharply below the escarpments of canyon walls that the speed limit drops to fifty miles per hour. We’ve left the original pioneer trail to deviate down Parley’s Canyon, past Park City. Many pilots and flight …
